Messages - Knee that Bends

Also, update on Kingdom Come: Deliverance. I'm about 12 hours in now. Great Old-school style RPG. The hud and UI look right out of Oblivion. Seems fairly historically accurate (although I'm no expert on 1400s Bohemia) So far loving it, very story-based, with good characters, writing, and choice. It's buggy as all hell right now, but hopefully that'll get patched. Don't even try to off-road with your horse, you'll just break shit. The save system is frustrating (sleep or drink a certain alcoholic beverage to save) but it's a welcome frustration, makes me more wary to enter battle with multiple or well armed foes. All in all I think it's a good game so far, I recommend it to any harcore RPGers. KC:D definitely does not hold your hand, but it's balanced.

Anybody playing Kingdom Come: Deliverance yet? I don't have a huge amount of time on my hands nowadays, but if this game lives up to the hype I will play the shit out of it. Let me know what you think of it so far!

The equalization of students kinda sucks both ways. There's people like you who were held back from their potential, and there are kids that are more intellectually challenged (not just talking about mental illness, or even ADHD, etc.) who have a harder time processing information and need more time or energy to learn a given subject. The way we put all students on an equal playing field hurts both sides, only benefitting the less and less common 'average' student. The question is how students can be split up by a means other than just age, without making the 'lesser' students be forgotten or branded as "stupid", etc. That's my personal opinion. You may notice I often comment on the suckage of modern american or world culture, yet almost never actually have a solution

specifically that students perform better on tests in the same room in which they studied the material yet we wrote our mid-terms/exams in the gymnasium. Plenty of other analogous strangeness in traditional pedagogy.

This cracks me up, it's almost as if they were trying to prove it to you by f***ing you over. Good stuff, madness

I just wanted to see what you all think of this idea. This is a quote from "Personal Space: The Behavioral Basis of Design" by Robert Sommer. Special to me personally, because he is my grandfather.

"[Man] will adapt to hydrocarbons in the air, detergents in the water, crime in the streets, and crowded recreational areas. Good design becomes a meaningless tautology if we consider that man will be reshaped to fit whatever environment he creates. The long-range question is not so much what sort of environment we want, but what sort of man we want." -Robert Sommer

A little background, Sommer is a [retired] professor of environmental psychology at UC Davis, and this is from his most well known book, which talks about how our surroundings affect us and our minds. Very interesting stuff imo.

This idea that we should build our surroundings to shape man, instead of shaping it to fit man I find to be very fascinating. For example, Sommer argues that classrooms should not be designed the way they are, fitting as many people in rows, with a teacher at the front, but instead a more "informally arranged" fashion. He believes this makes students more attentive, increasing how much knowledge said students take in. At times I start to feel like some ideas get criss-crossed. The theory seems to bend towards being utilitarian, not designing our environment to be pretty or comfortable but instead useful, yet he states we should make classrooms less "rigid". He has also commented about the positive effects of street art (and he himself is an artist). Does art and a more relaxing form of building design oppose his original idea of designing our surroundings to better ourselves?

I of course am not an expert on the subject, or even psychology and sociology in general, but I would like to see what other people think of this. I haven't done enough research myself, but I leave that boring stuff to you plebs Since I was very young my grandfather's works have puzzled and amazed me. When my mother was born, they were living on the grounds of a mental institution where my grandpa was testing the effects of guided LSD trips on schizophrenic patients. He's also a known expert on mushrooms, especially psychedelic mushrooms, and has interviewed multiple psychologically "unique" people in prison, including everyone's favorite cultist Charles Manson. So if you have any interest in the author of this quote, ask anything, I've got some crazy stories!

Those are awesome FB. It's kinda scary, I don't know how you did it, but your kell and mim look really familiar. Like people I've seen but can't place a finger on. Did you base them off anyone? Every time I look at it I swear they look so familiar. Maybe you just nailed my inner vision of those characters. Well done!

Dead Reckoningn. to find yourself bothered by someone’s death more than you would have expected, as if you assumed they would always be part of the landscape, like a lighthouse you could pass by for years until the night it suddenly goes dark, leaving you with one less landmark to navigate by—still able to find your bearings, but feeling all that much more adrift.

This makes sense emotionally of course, but the analogy is nonsensical. Dead reckoning is knowing your exact course and speed in relation to the land and yourself, to find out exactly where you are and where you are heading, time of arrival, etc. Having something called "dead reckoning" should not mean you feel "adrift". Quite the opposite. Someone didn't read the Chapman Guide to Piloting and Seamanship 67th edition apparently, SMH

Very well put, Bolivar. I was always a little let down how little they strayed from the OT in TFA. Not just how there was a lot of allusions (I.e. sandy planet, death star, etc.) but more that they didn't seem to surprise me at all. The prequel trilogy was George rehashing a lot of the same motifs, but with a whole new story, and with new assets. I thought TLJ was a little better in that aspect than TFA. Rian Johnson genuinely wanted to surprise us. There was definitely more plot twists, and more new ships, characters, creatures, weapons, etc. than TFA, which is surprising, seeing how TFA was the first in a new series. I loved all the stuff they added. Especially the redguards' weird sabers, how they didn't feel gimmicky *cough* *cough* Rebels TV show *cough* and the new big-ass-bunker-buster-cannon-of-death-and-destruction that almost rekt our favorite stormtrooper. It all seemed new and exciting, but it still felt Star Wars. You could say the same about the plot. Also, I thought they should've finished up with the old characters' storylines before throwing in new ones we didn't care about yet. For example, I would've been more attached to Mrs. Purple rebel if she was introduced in this movie as a background character, then brought to life in the next movie after Leia's death, taking her place as captain. This idea does NOT apply to Luke. I wanted more from Luke for sure. If they had done a scene like the Reylo back-to-back scene but with Rey and Luke? Bad FUCKING ass. We haven't seen two jedi fight side-by-side other than the prequels. It's so cool watching master and apprentice fight against a common foe. It really makes their relationship more meaningful. Especially in the case of Ani/Obi where you know they're going to have to fight each other eventually. That made Mustafar much more meaningful imo.